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Understanding Amazon by Alison Stuart

This week Alison Stuart talks about Amazon and her latest release, The King's Man.

Award winning Australian author, Alison Stuart learned her passion from history from her father. She has been writing stories since her teenage years but it was not until 2007 that her first full

length novel was published. Alison has now published 6 full length historical romances and a collection of her short stories. Her disposition for writing about soldier heroes may come from her varied career as a lawyer in the military and fire services. These days when she is not writing she is travelling and routinely drags her long suffering husband around battlefields and castles.

Does
anyone really understand how the great ‘Zon works when it comes to books (or
really any other kind of product – but I only deal in books)? There is mention
of mysterious algorithims and the words ‘SEO’ and ‘Discoverability’ are thrown
around like confetti.

Let
me begin by saying I am a ‘Hybrid’ author… I have several books published
through Escape Publishing (the digital imprint of Harlequin Australia) and I
have several books I independently publish. I have no control over my 3rd
party published books but I do over the ones I independently publish.

I
had my indie books spread across all the platforms – through Smashwords and
separately on Kindle. They were doing OK but Amazon was my mainstay. In July
last year they didn’t just tank, they stopped selling altogether. Why? I
suspected at the time it was to do with Kindle Unlimited coming on line and
effectively any indie authors not prepared to commit books to Amazon
exclusively were relegated to the end of the queue in that great mysterious
‘algorithim’.

For
12 months I watched my sales figures slide and in July this year I decided
SOMETHING had to be done. SOMETHING RADICAL. At that time I signed up to an
online course offered by English author Nick Stephenson and the ‘Ah Ha’ moments
began.

What
did I learn?

1.Amazon is NOT a book shop
it is a search engine – the same as Google and if you want readers to discover
your books, you need to understand ‘search engine optimisation’.

2.Key to discoverability is
having the correct KEYWORDS. As I mentioned I have no control over my 3rd
party books which may explain why my regency romance, LORD SOMERTON’S HEIR ended up as #1 in
Vikings, but I do control my own books so I went back and changed my categories
and keywords.

How do you find which are the right keywords for your
book? Open Amazon.com and imagine you are a reader trying to find a new
historical romance. Type ‘Historical Romance’ into the search bar and what do
you get…

Things
to note about this screen shot

·In the top right hand corner you will see there are 205,472
results for ‘Historical Romance”… and you wonder why no one ever discovers your
books?

·What you will also see in the right hand column are break
downs of historical romance… these are the ones you want to aim for eg. Regency
Historical Romance etc. Keep typing the search terms into the search bar and
narrow down the number of other books showing in the results. Optimum is about
1000 books.

Having
fixed my keywords, what did I do then?

·I moved all my indie books over to Kindle Unlimited. Yes I
sold out to the devil.

·I recovered and retitled 2 of my books so ‘keywords’ showed
up on the cover eg ‘SECRETS IN TIME’, A
Time travel Romance.

·I ran my first ‘free’ promo with a Book Bub ad. You have no
idea how counter intuitive this was for me! However I got 31k downloads and hit
several best seller lists (which continued into paid after the free promo
ended). I accept only a small proportion will ever read the book they
downloaded but what I did see was my book, HER REBEL’S HEART, appear on the
first page of several general searches. Type in English Civil War Romance and
there she is… ready to be discovered.

·The tangible benefit has been in reviews, sign ups to my
email list and from a monetary point of view the number of readers in the KU
program who downloaded my book.

I
still have a long, long way to go… away from promotions, my books still
struggle but what I am doing is maintaining my author rank and my
discoverability on Amazon. I am still doing MUCH better than I was 6 months
ago.

So
if you are indie published and your book sales are flagging, have a look at
your keywords and categories, whether those keywords appear on your cover
and in your book descriptions. It may
feel like a small step but it is worth investigating further.

The second in a tantalising trilogy from award-winning author Alison Stuart, about warriors, the wounds they carry, and the women that help them heal.

London 1654:Kit Lovell is one of the King’s men, a disillusioned Royalist who passes his time cheating at cards, living off his wealthy and attractive mistress, and plotting the death of Oliver Cromwell.

Penniless and friendless, Thamsine Granville has lost everything. Terrified, in pain, and alone, she hurls a piece of brick at the coach of Oliver Cromwell, and earns herself an immediate death sentence. Only the quick thinking of a stranger saves her.

Far from the bored, benevolent rescuer that he seems, Kit plunges Thamsine into his world of espionage and betrayal – a world that has no room for falling in love.

Torn between Thamsine and loyalty to his master and King, Kit’s carefully constructed web of lies begins to unravel. He must make one last desperate gamble – the cost of which might be his life.

Glad to hear that, Kelly. It is also about working your keywords into your title and blurb too that helps with discoverability. Seriously an author could spend their whole time just on this aspect of the business. #mustwriteabook

Thanks, Lexa but I wouldn't go that far. I think I have only just grasped the tip of the massive iceberg that is Amazon. If I really understood it I would be a permanent fixture on the best seller lists... which I'm not!

As a reader rather than a writer I found this intriguing. An author's lot is a great deal more complicated than I had ever realised, and the hard work certainly doesn't stop when the book is published.

That's a lot of hard yakka, but the training in your previous life, regarding research, would be beneficial in that regard. So glad you're moving forwards, Alison. I'll have to keep closer tabs on you to check up on your outcome. All the best for super results.

What an eye opening post. I had heard that key words were important on Amazon- but no one ever spelled it out and I didn't quite know what they were talking about. Things are very clear now. Thanks for sharing and wishing Alison the best of luck. I like the sound of her latest book. :) ~Jess

Interesting! I wonder if my publisher is using SEO when typing my book description. Of course, I've found even with Google, I can put "books for tween girls" and similar keywords on my website all I want, but there are so darn many other sites out there that have those keywords, I can't even make a dent!